Tai Chi

How do I start? This is a lot more difficult than I thought. Mmmmm………

I have been suffering back problems the last 14 years. It all started when I was working at an uncle’s warehouse. He had a tile business. The funny part is that I did not hurt my back while working; I hurt my back when I got back home from a college class. I was opening the door to my house and I put one step forward, all of a sudden, my lower back seized up and it started to hurt like hell. I could barely move. My sister was with me and she got scared. I was barely able to walk to the kitchen and sat in a stool. It took the pain to calm down about one hour. Talk about suffering. Since then I will have at least one spasm a year and one major spasm (similar to the pain level of my first spasm) every three years. About three weeks ago, I had my last major spasm and this time it scared me. I landed in the ER thinking I was having a heart attack. My middle back was killing me, I was feeling pressure on my chest, my left arm went numb and cold and I was feeling a tingle sensation from the left shoulder to my hand, and to top it off I was feeling light headed. I know that the title of the blog says Tai Chi. The reason I wrote this little story is because I wanted to give some background. I will try to do my best to keep an online journal of my experience.

I choose Tai Chi as an addition to the physical therapy that I’m under going. I have always been intrigued about Tai Chi, and after reading some of the benefits of Tai Chi are better posture and reducing occurrences of back pain spasm, among many more benefits, I decided to take Tai Chi Classes.

Today was my first day of Tai Chi. What an experience. We started doing warm-up exercises and stretches. My body has not moved like that since high school. When we finished with the warm-ups and stretching, I was already sweating (man, I have not done exercise in a long time) after that, we started the class. It was explained to me that the school that I go to they teach Internal Martial Arts. What it means is that, besides Tai Chi they teach two more disciplines, I don’t remember the names and what they are, but I will elaborate in another blog.

We started with the first two steps of the “Bear Form” It was ok, very simple to do, but I wanted to start doing all of the slow motions that you see in TV. I started to get impatient, but it’s my first time, so I said my self to calm down. After this, they split us up in to two groups, the newbie’s (my self and another guy) and the other people that where a little more advanced than us. This is where we started to do the slow motion movements, it went very well and I liked it. There where two moves that I was taught, but it was a little hard, it was explained to me it’s like rub the belly and pat the top of your head at the same time. At the end I got the two movements down.

I will keep you posted and let you know what my progress is in my adventure in to Tai Chi, or I should say the Internal Martial Arts, and let you know the progress on my back problems.